Links: Digital Urban Booklet, GE OSX UI Tweak, Peru Meteor Strike

March 31, 2008

I’m in Utah at the moment enjoying a few days of skiing in the heavily laden snow-covered mountains. Expect a few Google Earth visualizations showing GPS tracks of our skiing soon.

Digital Urban Booklet – Digital Urban blog has shared many interesting urban visualizations and developed useful tools for Google Earth (e.g. here, here, and here). The blog is written by Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith and represents things of interest to the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (CASA). They are releasing a preview of an upcoming book in the form of a “booklet” called “Digital Geography – Geographic Visualisation for Urban Environments“. The booklet has a focus on Neogeography, Web 2.0 and the various emerging techniques for urban visualisation. Available for £9.99 (worldwide postage and packaging is free). I have a copy on its way, and will provide more details after I read it.

GE OSX UI Tweak – Adam Betts decided he wanted to improve the look and feel to Google Earth on his Mac OS X. He has released a package which lets you replace some of the icons and layout of the buttons in Google Earth. MacApper has written a short tutorial explaining the steps taken to implement the tweak from Adam.

Peru Meteor Strike – Last September a meteorite struck a remote region of Peru. There were reports that locals who visited the site shortly after it struck got sick. Then scientists came to take measurements and to collect samples of debris from the site. The meteor crater was initially estimated to be 30 meters wide, but later determined to be 12 meters wide. Meanwhile, at the Google Earth Community, a member (and moderator) named ‘Hill’ posted his best guess from the news reports on the location of the strike. Later, as more news stories came out, he refined his guess. Eventually, a few days later, after the scientists arrived, Hill was able to get the exact coordinates of the strike – see here in Google Earth (unfortunately, low resolution imagery). Hill continued to follow the story, and recently posted that scientists have formed a new theory about the way certain types of meteorites can strike the Earth based on this strike. Read the entire thread of posts by Hill and others to follow this fascinating story (including more photos).

About Frank Taylor

Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was released. He worked in 3D graphics for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank left in 2009 to circumnavigate the earth by sailboat as part of the Tahina Expedition.

This blog and its author are not an official source of information from Google that produces and owns Google Earth
Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc..
All image screenshots from Google Earth are Copyright Google
All other trademarks appearing here are the trademarks of their respective owners.